Welcome to the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy

The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy is an interdisciplinary research and education initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara that aims to expand public understanding and discussion of important issues facing working people. In cooperation with the Department of History, the Center administers an undergraduate minor in Labor Studies and a graduate- level Colloquium in Work, Labor and Political Economy. The Center also hosts conferences and workshops that seek to advance an understanding of issues and ideas that contribute to an understanding, past and present, of American capitalism and the working class that sustains it.

Upcoming Events

• October 10, 2008: Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, "Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice," 1 p.m. , HSSB 4041.
  Fletcher, a longtime labor and international activist, is executive editor of Black Commentator and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal. Gapasin is a Central Labor Council President and former professor of Industrial Relations and Chicana/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Fletcher is also the author of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

• October 15, 2008:  Underground Undergrads Fall Campus Book Tour, 4 p.m., UCen State Street Room. 

  Undocumented UCLA students share their hardships and challenges in the fight for access to higher education.

  Underground Undergrads: UCLA Undocumented Immigrant Students Speak Out, features the growing student movement around access to higher education for undocumented students. Written by the students themselves, eight moving stories of undocumented immigrant students from UCLA provide the focal point of Underground Undergrads. The stories are unique and diverse, but they all demonstrate the pain, financial hardship, and emotional distress these students face as well as their ultimate triumph when they graduate from UCLA.

• October 17, 2008: Tobias Higbie (History, UCLA): "Working-Class Readers, Libraries and Networks of Self-Education in the Progressive Era," 1 p.m., HSSB 4041. (This talk will not be held in HSSB 4041.)
  Higbie is the author of Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930 (2003), which won the Philip Taft Labor Prize in Labor History.

• November 14, 2008: Gilbert G. Gonzalez (School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine): "Migration Patterns, Border Capitalism and the Bracero Program," 1 p.m., HSSB 4020. (This talk will not be held in HSSB 4041.)

  Gonzalez is Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Labor Studies Program at UC Irvine. He is the author of Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (1990) and Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants, 1880-1930 (2004).

• November 20-22, 2008: " 1968: A Year of Student Driven Change," Department of Black Studies, UCSB. Marking the 40th anniversary of the Black Student takeover of a computer building on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, a conference, "1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change," will take place at UCSB from November 20-22, of 2008. The conference will address pivotal issues related to education and focus on a particular subject—the place of ’68 for considering students as political and cultural innovators today.

• January 16-17, 2009: The Right and Labor: Politics, Ideology and Imagination, HSSB 6020.
  This conference expores the hostility of the political right to American trade unionism, both in terms of management-labor conflict and in the world of politics, ideas, and cultural imaginings. Contact the Center for more information.